The New York Times, by Isabel Wilkerson

By Isabel Wilkerson

CHICAGO, April 3— A fourth-grade classroom on a forbidding stretch of the South Side was in the middle of multiplication tables when a voice over the intercom ordered Nicholas Whitiker to the principal's office. Cory and Darnesha and Roy and Delron and the rest of the class fell silent and stared at Nicholas, sitting sober-faced in the back.

"What did I do?" Nicholas thought as he gathered himself to leave.

He raced up the hall and down the steps to find his little sister, Ishtar, stranded in the office, nearly swallowed by her purple coat and hat, and principal's aides wanting to know why no one had picked her up from kindergarten.

It was yet another time that the adult world called on Nicholas, a gentle, brooding 10-year-old, to be a man, to answer for the complicated universe he calls family.

How could he begin to explain his reality -- that his mother, a welfare recipient rearing five young children, was in college trying to become a nurse and so was not home during the day, that Ishtar's father was separated from his mother and in a drug-and-alcohol haze most of the time, that the grandmother he used to live with was at work, and that, besides, he could not possibly account for the man who was supposed to take his sister home -- his mother's companion, the father of her youngest child?

"My stepfather was supposed to pick her up," he said for simplicity's sake. "I don't know why he's not here."

Nicholas gave the school administrators the name and telephone numbers of his grandmother and an aunt, looked back at Ishtar with a big brother's reassuring half-smile and rushed back to class still worried about whether his sister would make it home O.K.

Of all the men in his family's life, Nicholas is perhaps the most dutiful. When the television picture goes out again, when the 3-year-old scratches the 4-year-old, when their mother, Angela, needs ground beef from the store or the bathroom cleaned or can't find her switch to whip him or the other children, it is Nicholas's name that rings out to fix whatever is wrong.

He is nanny, referee, housekeeper, handyman. Some nights he is up past midnight, mopping the floors, putting the children to bed and washing their school clothes in the bathtub. It is a nightly chore: the children have few clothes and wear the same thing every day.

He pays a price. He stays up late and goes to school tired. He brings home mostly mediocre grades. But if the report card is bad, he gets a beating. He is all boy -- squirming in line, sliding down banisters, shirt-tail out, shoes untied, dreaming of becoming a fireman so he can save people -- but his walk is the stiff slog of a worried father behind on the rent.

He lives with his four younger half-siblings, his mother and her companion, John Mason, on the second floor of a weathered three-family walkup in the perilous and virtually all black Englewood section of Chicago.

It is a forlorn landscape of burned-out tenements and long-shuttered storefronts where drunk men hang out on the corner, where gang members command more respect than police officers and where every child can tell you where the crack houses are.

The neighborhood is a thriving drug mart. Dealers provide curbside service and residents figure that any white visitor must be a patron or a distributor. Gunshots are as common as rainfall. Eighty people were murdered in the neighborhood last year, more than in Omaha and Pittsburgh combined.

Living with fear is second nature to the children. Asked why he liked McDonald's, Nicholas's brother Willie described the restaurant playground with violence as his yardstick. "There's a giant hamburger, and you can go inside of it," Willie said. "And it's made out of steel, so no bullets can't get through."

It is in the middle of all this that Angela Whitiker is rearing her children and knitting together a new life from a world of fast men and cruel drugs. She is a strong-willed, 26-year-old onetime waitress who has seen more than most 70-year-olds ever will. A 10th-grade dropout, she was pregnant at 15, bore Nicholas at 16, had her second son at 17, was married at 20, separated at 21 and was on crack at 22.

In the depths of her addiction, she was a regular at nearby crack houses, doing drugs with gang members, businessmen and, she said, police detectives, sleeping on the floors some nights. In a case of mistaken identity, she once had a gun put to her head. Now she feels she was spared for a reason.

She has worked most of her life, picking okra and butterbeans and cleaning white people's houses as a teen-ager in Louisiana, bringing home big tips from businessmen when she waited tables at a restaurant in downtown Chicago, selling Polish sausages from a food truck by the Dan Ryan Expressway and snow cones at street fairs.

She is a survivor who has gone from desperation to redemption, from absent mother to nurturing one, and who now sees economic salvation in nursing. Nicholas sees brand-name gym shoes and maybe toys and a second pair of school pants once she gets a job.

She went through treatment and has stayed away from drugs for two years. Paperback manuals from Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous sit without apology on the family bookshelf. A black velvet headdress from church is on the windowsill and the Bible is turned to Nehemiah -- emblems of her new life as a regular at Faith Temple, a Coptic Christian church on a corner nearby.

For the last year, she has been studying a lot, talking about novels and polynomials and shutting herself in her cramped bedroom to study for something called midterms.

That often makes Nicholas the de facto parent for the rest of the children. There is Willie, the 8-year-old with the full-moon face and wide grin who likes it when adults mistake him for Nicholas. There is Ishtar, the dainty 5-year-old. There is Emmanuel, 4, who worships Nicholas and runs crying to him whenever he gets hurt. And there is Johnathan, 3, who is as bad as he is cute and whom everyone calls John-John.

That is just the beginning of the family. There are four fathers in all: Nicholas's father, a disabled laborer who comes around at his own rhythm to check on Nicholas, give him clothes and whip him when he gets bad grades. There is Willie's father, a construction worker whom the children like because he lets them ride in his truck.

There is the man their mother married and left, a waiter at a soul food place. He is the father of Ishtar and Emmanuel and is remembered mostly for his beatings and drug abuse.

The man they live with now is Mr. Mason, a truck driver on the night shift, who met their mother at a crack house and bears on his neck the thick scars of a stabbing, a reminder of his former life on the streets. He gets Nicholas up at 3 A.M. to sweep the floor or take out the garbage and makes him hold on to a bench to be whipped when he disobeys.

Unemployment and drugs and violence mean that men may come and go, their mother tells them. "You have a father, true enough, but nothing is guaranteed," she says. "I tell them no man is promised to be in our life forever."

There is an extended family of aunts, an uncle, cousins and their maternal grandmother, Deloris Whitiker, the family lifeboat, whom the children moved in with when drugs took their mother away.

To the children, life is not the neat, suburban script of sitcom mythology with father, mother, two kids and golden retriever. But somehow what has to get done gets done.

When Nicholas brings home poor grades, sometimes three people will show up to talk to the teacher -- his mother, his father and his mother's companion. When Nicholas practices his times tables, it might be his mother, his grandmother or Mr. Mason asking him what 9 times 8 is.

But there is a downside. The family does not believe in sparing the rod and when Nicholas disobeys, half a dozen people figure they are within their rights to whip or chastise him, and do. But he tries to focus on the positive. "It's a good family," he says. "They care for you. If my mama needs a ride to church, they pick her up. If she needs them to baby-sit, they baby-sit."

It is a gray winter's morning, zero degrees outside, and school starts for everybody in less than half an hour. The children line up, all scarves and coats and legs. The boys bow their heads so their mother, late for class herself, can brush their hair one last time. There is a mad scramble for a lost mitten.

Then she sprays them. She shakes an aerosol can and sprays their coats, their heads, their tiny outstretched hands. She sprays them back and front to protect them as they go off to school, facing bullets and gang recruiters and a crazy, dangerous world. It is a special religious oil that smells like drugstore perfume, and the children shut their eyes tight as she sprays them long and furious so they will come back to her, alive and safe, at day's end.

These are the rules for Angela Whitiker's children, recounted at the Formica-top dining-room table:

"Don't stop off playing," Willie said.

"When you hear shooting, don't stand around -- run," Nicholas said.

"Why do I say run?" their mother asked.

"Because a bullet don't have no eyes," the two boys shouted.

"She pray for us every day," Willie said.

Each morning Nicholas and his mother go in separate directions. His mother takes the two little ones to day care on the bus and then heads to class at Kennedy-King College nearby, while Nicholas takes Willie and Ishtar to Banneker Elementary School.

The children pass worn apartment buildings and denuded lots with junked cars to get to Banneker. Near an alley, unemployed men warm themselves by a trash-barrel fire under a plastic tent. There is a crack house across the street from school.

To Nicholas it is not enough to get Ishtar and Willie to school. He feels he must make sure they're in their seats. "Willie's teacher tell me, 'You don't have to come by here,' " Nicholas said. "I say, 'I'm just checking.' "

Mornings are so hectic that the children sometimes go to school hungry or arrive too late for the free school breakfast that Nicholas says isn't worth rushing for anyway.

One bitter cold morning when they made it to breakfast, Nicholas played the daddy as usual, opening a milk carton for Ishtar, pouring it over her cereal, handing her the spoon and saying sternly, "Now eat your breakfast."

He began picking over his own cardboard bowl of Corn Pops sitting in vaguely sour milk and remembered the time Willie found a cockroach in his cereal. It's been kind of hard to eat the school breakfast ever since.

Nicholas and Willie on brotherhood:

"He act like he stuck to me," Nicholas said of Willie. "Every time I move somewhere, he want to go. I can't even breathe."

"Well, what are brothers for?" Willie asked.

"To let them breathe and live a long life," Nicholas said. "Everytime I get something, they want it. I give them what they want after they give me a sad face."

"He saves me all the time," Willie said. "When I'm getting a whooping, he says he did it."

"Then I get in trouble," Nicholas said.

"Then I say I did it, too, and we both get a whooping," Willie said. "I save you, too, don't I, Nicholas?"

"Willie's my friend," Nicholas said.

"I'm more than your friend," Willie shot back, a little hurt.

Once Willie almost got shot on the way home from school. He was trailing Nicholas as he usually does when some sixth-grade boys pulled out a gun and started shooting.

"They were right behind Willie," Nicholas said. "I kept calling him to get across the street. Then he heard the shots and ran."

Nicholas shook his head. "I be pulling on his hood but he be so slow," he said.

"Old slowpoke," Ishtar said, chiming in.

In this neighborhood, few parents let their children outside to play or visit a friend's house. It is too dangerous. "You don't have any friends," Nicholas's mother tells him. "You don't have no homey. I'm your homey."

So Nicholas and his siblings usually head straight home. They live in a large, barren apartment with chipped tile floors and hand-me-down furniture, a space their mother tries to spruce up with her children's artwork.

The children spend their free time with the only toy they have -- a Nintendo game that their mother saved up for and got them for Christmas. The television isn't working right, though, leaving a picture so dark the children have to turn out all the lights and sit inches from the set to see the cartoon Nintendo figure flicker over walls to save the princess.

Dinner is what their mother has time to make between algebra and Faith Temple. Late for church one night, she pounded on the stove to make the burners fire up, set out five plastic blue plates and apportioned the canned spaghetti and pan-fried bologna.

"Come and get your dinner before the roaches beat you to it!" she yelled with her own urban gallows humor. 

Faith Temple is a tiny storefront church in what used to be a laundry. It is made up mostly of two or three clans, including Nicholas's, and practices a homegrown version of Ethiopian-derived Christianity.

At the front of the spartan room with white walls and metal folding chairs, sits a phalanx of regal, black-robed women with foot-high, rhinestone-studded headdresses. They are called empresses, supreme empresses and imperial empresses. They include Nicholas's mother, aunt and grandmother, and they sing and testify and help calm flushed parishioners, who sometimes stomp and wail with the holy spirit.

The pastor is Prophet Titus. During the week he is Albert Lee, a Chicago bus driver, but on Sundays he dispenses stern advice and $35 blessings to his congregation of mostly single mothers and their children. "Just bringing children to the face of the earth is not enough," Prophet Titus intones. "You owe them more."

Nicholas's job during church is to keep the younger children quiet, sometimes with a brother asleep on one thigh and a cousin on the other. Their mother keeps watch from her perch up front where she sings. When the little ones get too loud, their mother shoots them a threatening look from behind the microphone that says, "You know better."

On this weeknight, Nicholas and Willie are with cousins and other children listening to their grandmother's Bible lesson.

She is a proud woman who worked for 22 years as a meat wrapper at a supermarket, reared five children of her own, has stepped in to help raise some of her grandchildren and packs a .38 in her purse in case some stranger tries to rob her again. On Sundays and during Bible class, she is not merely Nicholas's grandmother but Imperial Empress Magdala in her velvet-collared cape.

The children recite Bible verses ("I am black but beautiful," from Solomon or "My skins is black," from Job), and then Mrs. Whitiker breaks into a free-form lecture that seems a mix of black pride and Dianetics.

"Be dignified," she told the children. "Walk like a prince or princess. We're about obeying our parents and staying away from people who don't mean us any good."

The boys got home late that night, but their day was not done. "Your clothes are in the tub," their mother said, pointing to the bathroom, "and the kitchen awaits you."

"I know my baby's running out of hands," she said under her breath.

This is not the life Nicholas envisions for himself when he grows up. He has thought about this, and says he doesn't want any kids. Well, maybe a boy, one boy he can play ball with and show how to be a man. Definitely not a girl. "I don't want no girl who'll have four or five babies," he said. "I don't want no big family with 14, 20 people, all these people to take care of. When you broke they still ask you for money, and you have to say, 'I'm broke. I don't have no money.' "

Ishtar made it home safely the afternoon Nicholas was called to the principal's office. Mr. Mason was a couple of hours late picking her up, but he came through in the end.

Nicholas worries anyway, the way big brothers do. He worried the morning his mother had an early test and he had to take the little ones to day care before going to school himself.

John-John began to cry as Nicholas walked away. Nicholas bent down and hugged him and kissed him. Everything, Nicholas assured him, was going to be O.K.

By Isabel Wilkerson

CHICAGO— No one alive has seen the Father of Rivers yawn this high or this wide. No one imagined the Mississippi or its relatives would take such liberties, consuming so many hamlets whole, or that, if they did, technology would be nearly helpless to stop them.

There have been floods before. People in Hannibal, Mo., or Keokuk, Iowa, or Quincy, Ill., can tell you about watching their fathers and uncles pack sandbags to protect the year's corn crop or the feed store. For generations, some farmers figured floods and droughts into the cost of doing business. But then the country's big plumbing system of levees and dams, made better after every flood, was supposed to keep the rivers in their place and maintain the comfortable paradox of living on a floodplain.

Now the unimaginable has happened. Across the Midwestern cornbelt it has rained in biblical proportions -- 49 straight days, often in torrents. The rivers, driven past their banks, have taken back land that long ago was theirs, invading 15 million acres of farmland in eight states, forcing 36,000 people from their homes, halting river traffic for 600 miles and causing billions of dollars in damage.

From the air, from Minnesota to Missouri, from Kansas to Illinois, it looks like someone has spilled gallons and gallons of coffee on a green patchwork quilt that happens to be farms and towns. In silt rivers now wide as lakes, treetops look like bushes in a swimming pool, bridges and highways and other brave monuments to engineering are reduced to thin, threatened slivers, and even their builders know the water could take them, too, if it wanted. The floods have made the broad, S-curved Mississippi and its otherwise perfectly ordered valley look more like the Florida Keys.

Unlike earthquakes and hurricanes, floods defy the human urge to quantify. There is no single measure -- no Richter scale, or mile-per-hour wind as in the eye of a hurricane -- to gauge a flood. There are only the hundreds of crests and toppled levees on the rivers and their swollen creeks, and the thousand heartbreaks of lost soybean fields and moated Main Streets.

If the floods of 1993 have reminded people of anything, it is that the Mississippi River was never the docile pensioner some had come to think it was. It is not, after all, the Swanee. The Mississippi is America's watery aorta, draining or potentially flooding rivers in 31 states from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains.

"It's like talking about God Almighty himself," said Shelby Foote, the Memphis writer, who has lived his whole life on the river.

The river, ecologists and farmers say, was never supposed to follow the tight course humans have expected it to, indeed ordered it to, with their walls of dirt and concrete levees. Of course, that has not stopped people from building homes and farms and cities along the river. The Mississippi Valley's thick black soil is considered the richest on earth, impossible for farmers to resist.

But to claim the land meant making a bargain with the river, confining it to an artificially narrow path so that farms could reach as far as the shore and places like New Orleans and St. Louis could live undisturbed while their goods were carried safely from port to port. The price that river people pay is sudden and catastrophic flooding when excess rainwater, forced into a narrow channel by the levees, runs out of places to go and cannot drain naturally into the soil.

Then the river goes faster and faster, and it goes where it wishes, as it did during the flooding of the lower Mississippi in 1927, where, as William Faulkner wrote, the river "was now doing what it liked to do, had waited patiently the 10 years in order to do, as a mule will work for you 10 years for the privilege of kicking you once."

Mr. Foote was a boy during that flood. He remembers when word came that the levee had broken at Mounds Landing in Scott, Miss., north of Greenville. "It was a slow creeping rise," he said. "You can't even see it rise but if you turn away and then you look back, you see it is a little higher. Everything in its path is submerged or invaded. It presses against every crack and crevice. It's like solid wind when it comes."

Because of its might and willfulness, some ecologists argue that the very way people define a river is not particularly useful. They say that the river is not just whatever water you see in the channel, but the banks, the floodplain, in fact, the valley itself, from bluff to bluff. It is anywhere the water has been and could potentially go -- a river, Mark Twain said, "whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand bars are never at rest."

In earlier centuries, when towns in the bottomlands were invaded by river water, townspeople packed up and moved to higher ground -- as Franklin, Mo., for example, on the Missouri River, did in 1826. (Even that move could not save Franklin this time, however; the town is under water again.) Now, more than 7 million people live directly along the Mississippi, including more than 2 million around its confluence with the Missouri in St. Louis, where the two rivers are now cresting and levees straining and crumbling.

"No one is going to move St. Louis just because it happens to be in the river," said David Johnson, an aquatic ecologist who is assistant director of the School of Natural Resources at Ohio State University. "It's a question of working with the river or fighting the river. Fighting the river is almost always going to be a losing battle."

He argues for restoring the kind of wide open spaces that the river once had before Europeans and the great cities came, wetlands where the water could collect in times of severe rains. The Army Corps of Engineers reservoirs to catch the run-off, although the current flooding suggests they may not be enough. In defense of the complex and normally efficient flood control system, hydraulic engineers say that without the man-made reservoirs, the bloated river would now stretch from bluff to bluff, five miles across in spots, covering what we now know as Dubuque, Iowa, or St. Louis. Return of the Marshes

"People think of the river as their enemy," said David Lanegran, a professor of geography and urban studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. "They fight the river, dike the river, pollute the river, ignore the river. Now the river is taking back its old places. You can see the old marshes coming back in the farmers' fields, all the places where the duck ponds used to be. It's almost like a ghost. The water is saying, 'This is where I used to be. This used to be my place.' "

That may be cold comfort to people whose homes and businesses are under the water. But there are some important differences between this disaster and others.

Things have changed since the days of Mark Twain, when armed guards patrolled levees to insure no one tampered with them or when, according to his stories, just about the only time a crowd would gather on the river was for a dogfight or a lynching. The flood has been remarkable for the show of volunteerism and general goodwill; there have been few reports of looting, and many of people driving for miles to work through the night sandbagging someone else's levee. It is a contrast to the country's biggest disaster of last year, Hurricane Andrew, which brought looters, and merchants jacking up the price of generators and people posing as carpenters and bilking roofless homeowners.

In Des Moines, where flooding of the Raccoon River knocked out the fresh water supply of 250,000 people, leaving residents without water to drink or take showers or fight fires or flush toilets with, people have shared well water, grocery stores have discounted bottled water and every other morning three senior citizens drive to a nursing home for the handicapped, where they deliver fresh water and personally flush all 126 toilets.

Midwesterners do these kinds of things, people here say, because even most city people originally came from small, rural towns where everybody knows everybody and it is an insult to take advantage. "These are standard, practical and utilitarian Midwestern values," said Douglas Hurt, director of the graduate program in agricultural and rural studies at the Iowa State University. "If your neighbor needs help, regardless of the spats you've had, you help him."

If there is an economic beneficiary of this flood, it is the farm states of the eastern Midwest -- Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, where farmers will get to take advantage of the run-up in crop prices due to the low supply.

"That will make the flood even more painful for farmers in the floodplains," said William Heffernan, a professor and chairman of rural sociology at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "They will be watching the highest prices in years and, they don't have anything to sell." Lifting and Cleansing

As disastrous as a flood is to those in its path, it is nonetheless part of a natural cycle of renewal just as forest fires are. The river channels grow so wide and the currents so strong they lift topsoil, carry nutrients downstream and deposit them in new soil. Iowa's loss may be Missouri's gain, but then Iowa may get its own refill from Minnesota. The heavy rains that precede the flooding can also cleanse the river waters and make a better pool for fish to spawn.

The current crisis will undoubtedly set off wide debate over ways to improve the system with an eye not to just one city or river but to the 250 or so creeks and rivers that feed into the Mississippi.

Only fairly recently in the river's history, when Congress authorized a Federal levee project after the 1927 flood, has there been any system-wide approach to flood control. But that was based in part on bringing up to code the haphazard levees of assorted farm towns who in times of desperation built wherever they felt like it. New and better levees have gone up, but they, too, can fail.

"People expect more out of what was there than was ever intended," said Harry Kitch, chief of the central planning management branch of the Army Corps of Engineers. "Any one of our structures can be overtopped if you have a big enough flood. We do a great deal of sophisticated work in rebuilding them, but there can always be a bigger flood."

The great lesson of the floods may be that humans will have to do a lot more if they are to outwit nature, if that is even possible.

"I think we as moderns tend to think that geological and meteorological changes have stopped," said said Bruce Michaelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana, who is writing a book about Mark Twain, "that volcanoes will no longer erupt, that hurricanes will no longer come off the coasts and the great rivers of the world are going to stay quietly in their banks so we can cruise them in our boats and barges."

But just as the river that Mark Twain romanced and revered carried the pieces of wrecked houses and trees from floods upstream, so it does a century later -- "the debris," Professor Michaelson said, "of battlefields between water and man."